A New ASCO Documentary Can’t Nail Down This Slippery Artist Group

In the early 1970s, four artists from East Los Angeles got together for an exhibition with a provocative concept: to display their worst works. The resulting show gave them “asco” (the Spanish word for nausea or disgust), and thus was born ASCO, a collective that now ranks among the edgiest artists’ groups of the latter part of the 20th century.

Or at least, that’s one origin story.

There are many others, as would only befit this hard-to-pin-down group, which is now the subject of ASCO: Without Permission, a documentary that premiered last week at the SXSW festival. The documentary surveys how, between 1972 and 1987, these four artists—Harry Gamboa, Jr., Gronk, Willie Herrón III, and Patssi Valdez, along with a rotating cast of other collaborators—pushed the boundaries of what art could be. They created processions down Whittier Boulevard that became walking paintings, murals that could quickly be dismantled, and what they called “No Movies,” or scenes from movies that did not exist, and in the process, they changed LA’s art scene forever.

“So much of what they did was about saying, ‘No, we’re here and you can’t ignore us. And not only are we going to tag up your museum, but we’re going to turn it into our work of Chicano art and then, years from now, you’re going to show that in your museum,” journalist Carolina A. Miranda says in the film, directed by Travis Gutiérrez Senger, with actors Gael García Bernal and Diego Lunaserving as executive producers. “What artist wouldn’t want to do something like that?”

LACMA did just that in 2011, nearly four decades after ASCO produced its most famous work, Spray Paint LACMA (1972), at that museum. As the lore goes, Gamboa, after a visit to LACMA, asked a curator there why the museum had no art on view by Chicanos, to which the curator reportedly replied, “Chicanos don’t make art. They join gangs.” In response, Gamboa, Gronk, and Herrón headed to the museum at night and tagged their names on its facade. The following morning, Valdez and Gamboa returned to the scene, with Valdez standing before Gamboa’s camera to document this intervention.

Spray Paint LACMA is a poignant statement about who is and isn’t allowed to exhibit in museums, and it commonly acts as a starting point for ASCO. But the film instead opens with some larger context for the group.

In the late 1960s and early ’70s, Chicanos in East LA launched a movement, advocating for better education in the Eastside’s public schools and against the war in Vietnam, where a disproportionate number of Chicanos were dying. In the film, Gamboa remembers the presence of the Marines at Garfield High School; Valdez recalls that her home economics teacher told the students they better pay attention in that class as they would soon be cooking and cleaning for other people. These situations led to two important moments of protests: the East L.A. Walkouts of 1968, in which Gamboa was a student leader, and the National Chicano Moratorium in 1970. The Moratorium “crystalized a purpose for my art,” Herrón says.

Shortly afterward, Gamboa and Herrón started collaborating on Regeneración, a cultural and political journal that ran from 1970 to 1975 and was one of the Chicano Movement’s important sites of discourse. By the second issue, Gronk began contributing, and soon Valdez would too.

But the artists wanted to bring their work to life, not simply put it in print, and so, they produced The Walking Mural (1972). For the piece, Gronk, Valdez, and Herrón dressed up as a Christmas tree, the Virgin Mary, and Jesus, respectively, with Gamboa documenting, and walked the route of the canceled Christmas Parade on Whittier Boulevard. Art, protest, and community merged into something much larger, with more than 100 people joining in by the procession’s end. Through the piece’s title, ASCO aligned its work with the muralism associated with the Chicano Art Movement, with one key difference: the artists wanted to turn a “static medium into one of action,” as Gamboa puts it in the film.

Soon, ASCO began making “No Movies,” which predate Cindy Sherman’s “Untitled Film Stills.” According to Gamboa, good movies leave their viewers with a “singular image” that stays with them. The ASCO artists wanted to create pictures like these—except that theirs were from films that didn’t actually exist, even if they resembled the work of actual B-movie auteurs.

The “No Movie” performances are as political as ASCO’s other pieces. At the time, Latinos were often cast in stereotyped roles with heavy accents and largely denied the opportunity to direct features. The “No Movies,” which were shot on film stock to give it a cinematic quality, thus imagined the worlds that Latino filmmakers could dream up and execute. The Gores (1974), for example, is a ASCO’s take on a Chicano sci-fi film “at a time when Chicano sci-fi movies didn’t exist—there weren’t any,” according to curator C. Ondine Chavoya. In the resulting image, we see a man in a suit on the floor, surrounded by three people who seem to want to rip him apart; one holds a giant gold axe. Are they aliens kidnapping a scientist? The possibilities are endless.  

Gutiérrez Senger pays homage to the “No Movies” by interspersing his documentary with short films made in collaboration with artists San Cha, Maria Maea, and Ruben Ulises Rodriguez Montoya. One resembles a news broadcast disparaging Latinos; it soon gets taken over by mutant humans who are in fact Latinos. Another is a queer love story that unfolds in the Second Street Tunnel, a frequent ASCO site. “Their work was a call to action,” Gutiérrez Senger says of ASCO in a voiceover. “We decided to answer their call by collaborating with a group of artists to carry their tradition forward.”

The experiment doesn’t quite work, since the short films are mainly just disruptive. But the shorts are useful in showing how ASCO blended fact and fiction, and in underling how Gutiérrez Senger’s film is furthering ASCO’s project. You come to realize that you should take the lore shared here with a grain of salt, as when Gamboa talks about Decoy Gang War Victim (1974), which he says depicts the last gang member killed after a truce and were subsequently published by different new outlets.

The documentary grounds ASCO within film history, enlisting well-known actors, including recent Oscar winner Zoe Saldaña, to speak about the power of ASCO’s art. ASCO was undoubtedly influenced by Hollywood, with the “No Movies” even getting marketing campaigns that mimicked those for studio films. What could ASCO have accomplished, had its members had the means to make a Hollywood film? It’s a question the documentary asks, and one that could be posed for many creatives of color of ASCO’s generation, both within the art world and the film industry.

Personally, I’d prefer to know about what ASCO was able to accomplish. The group’s contributions to art history are important, if still underrecognized, even after the LACMA show. Gutiérrez Senger’s film leaves out a lot of art historical context, and that does a disservice to ASCO’s legacy.

ASCO wasn’t working in a vacuum—it was responding not just to the politics of the Chicano Movement but the art that sprang from it. In this way, ASCO is part of a larger context, but the documentary treats them like outliers, as though they were the only Chicano artists making art during this era. In fact, they were reacting against a definition of what Chicano art should look like in service of the movement.

The documentary doesn’t credit ASCO for creating actual institutional change. Spray Paint LACMA led that museum to mount a survey for Los Four, another East LA–based Chicano artist collective, in 1974, likely making LACMA the first mainstream museum in the US ever to mount such an exhibition for Latinx artists. Without this art history, we get an incomplete picture.

But my biggest issue with ASCO: Without Permission is that it mostly sidesteps one key part of how ASCO’s legacy remains unsettled. Toward the end of the film, we learn that founders started going their own way—Valdez went to art school, Herrón became a touring musician—and that’s ultimately what led to its dissolution by 1987. In the years since, there’s been a debate among its members about how collaborative the group really was. Gronk and Valdez assert that it was a collective endeavor, while Gamboa has tried to take sole credit for much of the work, and Herrón not saying much either way. It’s widely known that this bitter divide continues today, so it’s a feat that all four agreed to be interviewed for this documentary.

In a 2023 Los Angeles Times piece about authorship and copyright issues surrounding ASCO, Carolina A. Miranda wrote that “trying to verify even the most basic information is like trying to catch smoke with your hands.”  We’ll never know who contributed what to which ASCO work, or what really went on between the artists, who each went on to produce work individually that looks completely different. But this much is clear: their youth and their fearlessness, their reaction to the politics of their time, their brainstorming sessions, the tensions and interpersonal conflicts, and, most importantly, each member’s unique artistic visions is what made ASCO, ASCO.

It’s hard to get ASCO right, and I’m not sure any one curator, critic, or filmmaker can. But I’m glad ASCO: Without Permission—a film whose brilliant double entendre of a subtitle leaves open whether or not the whole thing was authorized—tried. Perhaps this is what makes ASCO still relevant half a century later. The group’s future remains unfixed, and its images from the 1970s still pack a punch today, resonating in a moment when the past doesn’t feel all that different from the present.